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(2019) Laura Cannell - The Sky Untuned
Review:
…Originally from East Anglia, Laura Cannell’s music often charts the landscapes of rural England, picking up the resonances of their histories and memory. In an interview, she told: “I don’t set out to transcribe the landscape but it keeps showing up in everything I do.”
Her new album, The Sky Unturned, was recorded in one take at St Andrew’s Church in Raveningham in Norfolk, and the influence of performing and recording in churches also has an indelible effect. In the same interview she says: “I feel that as someone who goes into a lot of ancient buildings, I have discovered the different elements I look for in terms of sound and feel. My favourites are almost completely stone, with very few pews and not too much else.” And yet her latest album is also influenced by travelling around the UK as a touring musician, and a sense of movement through land is apparent. From the spiralling acceleration on ‘Flaxen Fields’ to foreboding arrival on ‘Landmark’, the album undulates with the planes she traverses. On centrepiece track ‘Flaming Torches’ a sense of people’s intrusion into nature is regaled, rising and falling like both geographical contours and human history. In her sonic travels, a fluidity of place is reached. The world’s seeming permanence is subsumed by the fluidity of her own perception, whether through the frenetic violins on ‘Untethered’ or the restive recorders on ‘Organum’. It is through movement that resonances of different places are left behind. In the album notes, she says that this album seeks to reveal the sounds of the universe that humans do not hear, doing so through a theory of the music of the spheres. It is indeed both through a sense of the movement of the world around us and our own moving through it that the album gets a sense of the universal, of the transcendent. Time itself orbits with repeated melodies explored on each track, their focus a sort of gravity. Through this appreciation of fluidity in time and space, the world is de-reified, shown up to be as transient as the experiences we have in it. Yet subjectivity is maintained. Laura’s perceptual position, as the focal violinist and recorder player, inevitably grounds the music’s appeal to the transcendent – again a form of gravity. This musical voice passes through the land as much as the land passes through the music though. After the chirpy melody of ‘Organum’ we then reach the sombre melancholy of ‘Transient Thresholds’. As we pass through and experience the world, we also lose the experience just had and the thresholds to this experience’s inner secrets dissipate into the past, or perhaps more accurately the ‘passed’. The overall effect is a sense of the transience and impermanence of time and place, the subjective voice always in loss, the land always being lost as we move through and out of it. Our movement through the world and its landscapes is always frittering away, moving from present to no longer. As the album closes on ‘Striking the Lost Bells’, the ‘passed away’ world is mourned. There is, at points, also an eeriness to ‘The Sky Unturned’ – a feeling of, as Mark Fisher describes it, ‘when there is something present where the should be nothing’, or ‘nothing present when there should be something’. As this music passes through the world, a loss of presence is established in the mournful transience of this album – something is gone which once was and this leaves an eerie emptiness; and yet on ‘Untethered’ and ‘Human Torches’ a perceptive intrusion exposes the fragility that our presence in the world creates – an eerie anguish only imposed onto places by our perception. Therein lies, perhaps, the fundamental sadness to this album – the sense that melancholy only exists in land due to our perception and therefore our imposition of this onto that which is perceived. Our feeling of transience creates a sense of loss, of the world passing by, and this melancholy itself imbues the landscape with mourning.
Tracklist:
01 - Flaxen Fields
02 - Untethered
03 - Landmark
04 - Flaming Torches
05 - Organum
06 - Transient Thresholds
07 - Striking the Lost Bells
Summary:
Country: UK
Genre: alternative folk
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~ 686-858 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits |
